The Conscience of a Hacker

How to Use Rsync to Make a Remote Linux Backup?


<pre>

                               ==Phrack Inc.==

                    Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3 of 10

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The following was written shortly after my arrest...

                       \/\The Conscience of a Hacker/\/

                                      by

                               +++The Mentor+++

                          Written on January 8, 1986
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

        Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers.  "Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
        Damn kids.  They're all alike.

        But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?  Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
        I am a hacker, enter my world...
        Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
        Damn underachiever.  They're all alike.

        I'm in junior high or high school.  I've listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction.  I understand it.  "No, Ms.
Smith, I didn't show my work.  I did it in my head..."
        Damn kid.  Probably copied it.  They're all alike.

        I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second, this is
cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up.  Not because it doesn't like me...
                Or feels threatened by me...
                Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
                Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
        Damn kid.  All he does is play games.  They're all alike.

        And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found.
        "This is it... this is where I belong..."
        I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
        Damn kid.  Tying up the phone line again.  They're all alike...

        You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless.  We've been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic.  The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

        This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud.  We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals.  We explore... and you call us criminals.  We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals.  We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

        Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity.  My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.

        I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.  You may stop this individual,
but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

                               +++The Mentor+++
_______________________________________________________________________________
</pre>

Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity.  My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.


Imagine losing all your data by accidentally doing sudo rm -rf /someDirectory, sucks right? But it happens to the best of us. Now, if it was a Windows system, we could have used numerous backup options like OneDrive to secure our data. But what about Linux? Fortunately, we have some very robust tools to backup our Linux system too, and one of them is rsync.

Short for **R**emote **SYNC**, rsync is a CLI backup utility through which you can perform both local and remote backups in a secure and efficient way. It is secure because it uses SSH (secure shell) and efficient because it supports something called as incremental backup. Now what is incremental backup? In simple terms, rsync compares the file size and last modified time, and backs up only those files that have changed. rsync has become the industry standard to backup Linux systems for the last two decades because of a few additional reasons too, which are beyond the scope of this article.

Alright, enough theory. Now let's see how to backup our Linux system to a remote computer using rsync.

## Preparing for backup

You need to have rsync installed on both the source and destination machines. Generally, it comes preinstalled with most distros. You can check it by doing:

```bash
rsync --version
```

If it is not installed, you can get it by doing:
```bash
sudo apt install rsync
```
for Debian based systems, or an equivalent command for other package managers.

## Backing up using rsync

After rsync has been setup on both the machines, we are now ready to send data back and forth. The rsync command is very simple, almost like the cp command that we all have been using for so long. A simple rsync command looks like this:

```bash
rsync  [OPTIONS]  SRC  DEST
```

Before getting down to the actual business, let's learn about a few important rsync flags that we are gonna be using.

### Important rsync options / flags

<table>
    <tr>
        <th>Option</th>
        <th>Description</th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>-r</td>
        <td>recurse into directories</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>-z</td>
        <td>compress file data durig transfer</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>-v</td>
        <td>increase verbosity</td>
    </tr>
</table>

To see the full list of rsync options, just enter *rsync --help* into the terminal.

For the sake of this article, we will be backing up a directory from my PC which contains an image from the movie Coco to a remote server. I mean the movie is too cute to not back up, right?

The image miguel.jpg is inside a directory called coco in the home directory of my PC. So, we will simply write:

```bash
rsync -rsvz coco root@159.89.x.x:/backup
```

Here, -rsvz is all the options that I want, coco is the local directory that I want to backup, root is the username for my remote PC, 159.89.x.x is the IP address/hostname of the remote server, and finally, `/backup` is the destination directory that I want to put my backup into. Simple right?
It's just `rsync -options source destination`.

After I run the command, it will ask for the password for remote username (root in this case).

After entering the password, rsync will backup the directory that you had specified. Like you can see, it has also printed a bunch of information to the console, that's because we had used the -v option.

Now that the backup has succeeded, let's verify it on the remote server too. I had set the destination to `/backup`, so I will do:
```bash
ls /backup --recursive
```
on the remote machine to list all the directories and files recursively.

Like, you can see, our backup has been uploaded successfully to the remote machine, now you can rest assured that you will always have Coco with you even if you delete it by mistake. You can simply reverse the source and destination arguments to restore the backup from the remote server.

## Conclusion

rsync is a very powerful tool. Do you want to learn one more cool trick? You can write a bash script for performing backup, and schedule a cron job to automatically run the script. And boom, you have your own automatic backup solution, just like OneDrive or Google Drive. I suggest you play with all the options of rsync, if you want to fully understand its potential. You should also check out rclone, which was inspired by rsync and offers similar functionalities for the cloud! For example, you can copy contents to and from Google Drive, or AWS S3. You can also use rclone to sync directories between clouds, like OneDrive and Google Drive!

Rsync is an awesome utility for transferring files. Let's use it to backup files, just like Google Drive.

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